Friday, March 4, 2016

"We hired a great inorganic chemistry professor last
year,” Mike, a UW-River Falls chemistry professor, told me. “Unfortunately
she’s leaving in May for St. Olaf.” I visited St. Olaf in Northfield,
Minnesota. They have a great chemistry department.

Mike told me his department used to have 15 professors. They
now have 11 – soon to be 10. They plan to replace the person leaving but it’s
getting harder to recruit and retain faculty.

The consequences of deep budget cuts to education are
disparate but all around us.

Deep budget cuts to the UW system results in fewer course
offerings and programs, larger classes and less staff. UW Extension is
proposing to remove extension agents from many rural counties. The UW Madison
Ag program announced the loss of the only dairy sheep program in the country.
Faculty are moving on to greener pastures.

There is a similar story in K-12 education.

I spoke with Katie, an Eau Claire special education teacher
who serves on the district’s compensation committee. The committee is working
to find money to keep teachers. Katie said, “No raise in seven years is really
hard for a lot of families.” Katie worked with an “amazing” special education
teacher hired seven years ago who makes less than recently hired teachers.

Like so many other school districts, Eau Claire is
considering options for a fall referendum. With declining state aid and rising
costs, people across the state have voted to raise property taxes to keep their
schools operating.

Alma passed a 38% increase in the school portion of property
taxes to pay for a new furnace and keep the lights on.

Other school districts’ referenda aren’t successful.
Prescott just lost a referendum to cover operating costs. They now face $1.5
million in additional cuts – over 10% of the district budget. Local people
worry more teachers will leave for Minnesota – a state making significant
investments in education.

At a recent Chippewa Valley legislative forum with local
school officials, one of my colleagues abruptly left the event upset about a
school board member’s comments that Minnesota was doing better financially than
Wisconsin.

Specifically the board member mentioned Minnesota’s $1
billion budget surplus, funding for education and the big difference between
the two states with regard to the prison population. The two states have a
similar population and crime rate but Wisconsin incarcerates more than double
the number of individuals.

My legislative colleague thought it unfair to compare. But
is it?

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, in
Wisconsin 87% of children with at least one parent lacking a high school
education are likely to be living in poverty. In Minnesota, 32% of children
live in poverty while 39% of Wisconsin children live in poverty.

Among the risks of poverty is lack of education achievement,
which can negatively affect life opportunities. Studies show that low education
attainment and low incomes can increase the risk of incarceration. Minnesota
incarcerates fewer individuals while Wisconsin spends more on prisons than on
the UW system.

It is wiser to invest in breaking the cycle of poverty.

Poor children need resources – books, teacher time, health
care, and food – things that cost money, which brings us back to school
funding.

At the forum, we discussed needed changes to the school
funding formula. I reminded everyone that State Superintendent Tony Evers
submitted in his budget a proposal to change the formula called Fair Funding
for Our Future.

Mr. Evers described his proposal as containing “a number of
provisions to fix the funding formula by investing in all students, protecting
rural and declining enrollment districts, making adjustments in the aid formula
to account for poverty, providing property tax relief and increasing general
school aid.”

This is the third time he introduced this proposal. It is
the third time Governor Walker and the Majority in the Legislature chose not to
pass it.

Education budget cuts end up costing us more. As state funds
shift from education to safety (prisons and law enforcement), it becomes harder
to break out of the cycle.

But break out of it we must. The investments we make in a
child’s future don’t just help one family. The investments help all of us.